NAME

       catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages

SYNOPSIS

       catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...

DESCRIPTION

       catman  is  used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as cat pages.  Cat pages
       are generally much faster to display than the original manual pages, but  require  extra  storage  space.
       The  decision  to  support  cat  pages  is  that  of  the  local administrator, who must provide suitable
       directories to contain them.

       The options available to catman are the manual page hierarchies and sections to pre-format.  The  default
       hierarchies  are  those specified as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file, and the default
       sections are either the colon-delimited contents of the environment variable $MANSECT or the standard set
       compiled into man if $MANSECT is undefined.  Supplying catman with a set of whitespace-delimited  section
       names will override both of the above.

       catman makes use of the index database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files need
       to be formatted.

OPTIONS

       -d, --debug
              Print debugging information.

       -M path, --manpath=path
              Specify  an  alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path.  By default, this is all
              paths indicated as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file.

       -C file, --config-file=file
              Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.

       -?, --help
              Print a help message and exit.

       --usage
              Print a short usage message and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

ENVIRONMENT

       MANSECT
              If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is  used  to  determine
              which manual sections to search and in what order.  The default is "1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 3posix 3pm
              3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config.

       MANPATH
              If  $MANPATH  is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search
              path to use.

              See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the  default  behaviour  and  details  of  how  this
              environment variable is handled.

FILES

       /etc/manpath.config
              man-db configuration file.

       /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              A traditional global index database cache.

       /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.

SEE ALSO

       man(1), manpath(5), mandb(8)

AUTHOR

       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).

BUGS

       https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues
       https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db

2.12.0                                             2023-09-23                                          CATMAN(8)